Zero Sum (30 page)

“Idiots!” Jules roared. “It’s not a bloody attack!”

I grabbed Jules and lifted her over the front desk. No one was in the mood to listen. Folks thought their families were in danger, and they were consumed with saving their skins. Random bursts of magic blasted off the ceiling. Someone fired off a handgun. The Christmas tree toppled over. The valet’s station was raided. Men and women jammed into random cars. A blast from Agent Tools shotgun was all that kept him from being dragged from his SUV. Someone shattered the white wagon’s passenger side window. A man and a woman jumped inside. We watch helplessly as our ride hopped the curb, churned up some sod, and headed to parts unknown. Thirty seconds later, the lobby was a mess of writhing bodies, and Madam Fremont’s plan was in tatters.

“Well shit,” Dante said. “Now what?”

I grabbed another complimentary apple.

This time, Jules took one too.

Chapter 13

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU

There was little talk as we slipped onto the flat plains of Kansas. Wispy cirrus clouds stretched across the horizon. Spent husks of harvested wheat swirled across the road. An errant gust of wind was the drive’s only punctuation.

I tried but failed to move the seat buckle that was digging into my left cheek. The majority of the SUV’s cabin space was dedicated to overstuffed crates of medicinal herbs. That left the four of us sharing a single row. Dante was snoring off his hangover to the right of me. Rei had gone board stiff to the left of me. We were doing a really good impression of magical sardines. I’d given up hope of ever feeling my feet again.

Ignoring the tingles in my toes, I returned my attention to Carrera’s book. I was still no closer to piecing together Albright’s message. Why had he handed me this strange book on history? What did the Battle of Chapultepec have to do with our current predicament? Madam Fremont’s words had only made the case more confusing. Diego Carrera couldn’t be planning to win back the Western States for Mexico. That would require an illegal foray into Imperiti politics. The ICE would intervene, and if they were anything like Gastone Spinoza, the alguacils would mop the streets with Talmax’s entrails. In my mind, that left the revenge. Carrera and company could just be busting into the United States to cause as much carnage as possible. It was a reasonable possibility. I knew a lot of folks that would do worse to the people that killed their brother and hacked their country in half. But Madam Fremont’s words had shaken me. She claimed Carrera was fighting for justice, and justice is not the same as revenge. Both can employ violence. Both can right a wrong. But revenge is personal. Justice is impartial. Fremont was careful with her words, and I was certain she was well aware of the distinction…so how could a bloody path of conquest achieve justice for anyone?

I looked over at Jules.
 

The eternally studious witch had a pink highlighter clenched between her teeth like a pirate’s dagger. She was busy flipping through a slim volume with fresh glossy pages:

Advances in Tactical Magic: The Hewn Path of the Flaming Sword

I raised an eyebrow.
 

“Jules, are you studying for war?”
 

She gave me a cursory glance. I’d tried for snarky, but it had come out all needy.
 

“Is it any good?” I asked.

Jules flipped the page.

I bit my lip.

“Well?”

She flipped another page.

“Quite.”
 

I leaned across Dante’s corpse (which still reeked of booze). The new page featured an engraving of a man wielding the ‘Lance of Loki’. Flames were shooting out of the top of it. Flames were shooting out of the sides of it. An entire citadel was engulfed behind him.

“Can I have a look?”

Jules’ jaw went taught.
 

“Absa-fockin-lutely not.”
 

She slammed the manual shut.

“Would you two be quiet,” Jasper grumbled. “The radio is hard enough to hear without your racket.”

Not wanting to tick him off, the two of us turned back to our books. Jasper had been in a foul mood for the whole drive. The medics’ report had been downright depressing. The casualty figures coming out of Arizona were staggering, and Talmax had managed to slip some men behind our lines to blow one of I-80’s tunnels in Wyoming. The ley network was pretty thin through the Rockies to begin with. Now, with I-80 down, retreating Magi were forced to travel on mana-bare roads. Squads of DEA mages had to divert from Salt Lake to cover the civilian retreat, further thinning our lines on the front. Jasper had cursed for fifteen minutes straight when he’d gotten the news. The setbacks were bad enough, but the risk of exposure was worse. The mainstream press was reporting a mobile meth lab had exploded, but Talmax had—yet again—drawn major media attention to our little magic conflict. More than anything, Jasper was worried this fight would get blown out into the open. Visions of future witch-hunts must have been dancing through his head.

Francesca remained nonplussed. The fire-haired cataphract spent the idle time rewrapping the grips on her daggers. From time to time, Francesca would pause to look up at the romstone resting on the SUV’s black faux-leather dash. Romstones were semi-transparent crystals I’d seen a few times at Elliot. The product of eons of dead plankton fused together into a single stone, romstones were found hiding in dank caves and sheer limestone cliffs. The Magi valued romstones because when a large amount of mana changed position, they gave off a red ethereal glow. The natural effect was quite subtle, but pushing a bit of mana into the crystal boosted the brightness substantially.

Leyline surveyors tied the little crystals to the end of their dowsing rods. They could be used to trace out the paths of even the tiniest trickle of a leyline. Francesca was using her romstone for a different purpose. She had it set up like a radar detector. Magical creatures toted around a lot of mana too. So if a powerful super approached a romstone, it would cause the crystal to light up as well. The whole radar detector thing was a good idea in theory…but it wasn’t working out too well for us in practice. The problem is that romstones aren’t choosy. They light up if lightning strikes, or if you pass by a big box store, or if an angel farts in Australia. It just gets worse if you pump them full of mana—and that’s exactly what Francesca had done. The constant false alarms didn’t seem to trouble her, but they were turning Jasper into a stress case.

I forced myself to sleep until we passed through Denver. There was no point in trying to make a run for it right now. The gruff cataphract appeared to be a tireless, methodical creature…not an ideal guard to sneak away from. It was better to save up our strength for whatever Fremont had planned in Green River. Ill-tempered gusts hampered our progress through the mountains, but Jasper insisted on maintaining an intense pace. Every time we’d come close to oblivion, Jasper would mutter a spell to make the tires better grip the asphalt. I said a silent thanks when the terrain flattened out. Magical traction control or not, I really hated heights.

Dante and Rei woke up as we reached Grand Junction, Colorado, the final stop prior to the long crawl to Green River, Utah. Jasper tried to gas up, but all the petrol had been slurped dry. The local coal gasification plant had broken down last evening, and they wouldn’t be able to import any fuel until after the storm. Not a single motel had a vacancy, and a haggard-looking highway patrolman advised us against proceeding. Truckers played cards in the local coffee house, praying a new fuel shipment arrived before they went bankrupt. Benevolent locals took stranded bus passengers into their homes.
 

Jasper was undeterred. He offered another driver a thousand dollars for the contents of his tank. That netted us ten gallons, enough to make the long, winding stretch.
 

As we struck out across the dry cracked earth, ours was just about the only vehicle on the road. Storm clouds began to crest on the horizon. It was looking to be one of those rare winter thunderstorms. Monstrous anvils stretched high into the sky. Lightning bolts lit up the stratosphere. The romstone went into frenzy. I passed the time counting the seconds between lightning strikes and crystalline sparks. Mana traveled slower than light but much faster than sound.
 

What that meant I had no idea.
 

I jotted down a few equations to try and account for it.
 

By the time the first snowflakes started to fall, we hadn’t seen another car for an hour, and I really needed to get my hands on a calculator. Francesca was still checking the mirrors after each and every flash, but I didn’t really see the point. People were taking the weather advisories seriously. Our biggest enemy tonight was going to be the icy road.

Agent Tools let out a sigh.

“Francesca, would you put that damn stone away? It’s worth shit in a storm.”

Francesca turned and stared at him.
 

Some unheard conversation danced between them.

Francesca smirked.
 

“Two thousand,” she whispered.
 

Beside me, Dante quivered. Someone had taken a red-hot brand to Francesca’s vocal cords. Her voice could only manage one pitch, and it issued out of her like the hard grit of sandpaper. Rei leaned forward. She examined Francesca with new interest.

“Here?” Jasper asked aloud. “Now?”

Francesca nodded.

Jasper considered it. “Fine. Two thousand. But if I win, I’m tossing it out the window.”

Placing the romstone back on the dash, Francesca returned her attention to her daggers. I watched as she crafted strange symbols into the sides of the blades. They looked vaguely like claws, but I had no idea what they meant. Jules turned to Dante. She’d been a bundle of nervous energy ever since we’d left Salinas in the dust.

“So what be the plan?”

“We wait,” Dante replied. Heavy bags burdened his eyes. He looked even worse than this morning.

“And why must we?” Rei’s hands rested in her oversized hoodie’s pocket. I had no doubt what she was thumbing.

The three of us gave her the visual veto. There would be no stabbing DEA agents in the neck with box-cutters.

“But this is so
dull
.” Rei crossed her arms and glared at me. “And I am still not believing that you have lost all the snacks.”

“Again with that?” I asked. “Who cares about a stupid cooler? I lost my thermos. Some dirty-fingered bastard is probably filling it full of Mountain Dew right now.”

“Sloth ricochets, Dieter. You were the fool that lost us our most dear possessions.”
 

“The cooler was freakin’ heavy. Why the hell would I carry it all the way up the stairs?”

“Because it was a gift, and because I was trusting you to do so.” Rei jammed on her sunglasses and stared out into the empty expanses of Eastern Utah.

I scowled. Rei’s foul mood was leaking across the weft. At least I was getting the hang of recognizing the phenomenon. I bit my lip before I ended up shouting something back at her.

Francesca flipped through the static on the radio. A lone AM station was all she could get. An angry man was railing against something-or-other. You could just picture his fat jowls slapping his throat as he spoke:

“Why should our taxes be paying these scumbags? We don’t need ten layers of bureaucrats telling us what to teach. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place, listening to these world order drones. Open a freaking book. Read the freaking book. That’s what education is all about. We don’t need computers in our classrooms. We don’t need Madam President packing our children’s lunches. Lesson plans don’t need people’s committees. We don’t need help doing our jobs—and we don’t need help raising our kids. These Washington scumbags: they hang out in their fancy dinner clubs. They eat steak and lobster on our dime. And now they want to adopt international educational standards? What about American educational standards, remember those? My friends. My dear, dear friends. If we don’t kill the Department of Education, they’re going to drain every last drop of blood from our throats.”

I blinked.
 

Wait a minute…

“Drusilla?” Jules started.

A bad thought was brewing in her skull.

Heck, the same bad thought was brewing in mine.

“What is it, Druid? If you are wishing to speak, it is best to actually do so.”

“Was there anythin’ else in that cooler?”

Rei tucked her hair into her cap and impregnated a pause.

“Of course not.”

Stars above, she was an atrocious liar.
 

“Awen’s ghost, how much did ya lose?”

“How much are you thinking? My backpack lacks a freezer section, Druid.”

I looked left and right. “Just to be clear on this, we’re not talking about handles of vodka, right?”

Dante looked ill again.

“We most certainly are not,” Jules replied.

“I am perfectly fine,” Rei insisted.

I frowned. I didn’t know much about Nostophoros metabolism but…

“Didn’t, like, all your skin burn off last night?”

She turned back to her window watching.

“That was nothing.”
 

Her stomach let out a borborygmic moan.

The three of us slid to the right.

Refusing to look back at us, Rei let out a huff. “I most appreciate this voting of confidence. It is good to know in which trajectory your assholes face.”

Agent Tools peeled his bloodshot eyes from the road.
 

“What are you four going on about back there?”

I wasn’t going to pass up on the chance.

“We’re talking about stopping for food in Green River.”

“Yea,” Dante agreed. “It’s about to turn into the Donner Party back here.”

Rei may or may not have growled.

“You have your MREs,” Jasper replied. “There’s a jug of H2O in the back.”

I examined the packet of green sludge that claimed to be food for our soldiers. It smelled like a mixture of pickles and beer. If I were a grunt, I’d throw it at my enemies. The need to escape aside, things
were
getting desperate back here. Jasper had kept us on absolute lockdown since leaving St. Louis. We weren’t even allowed out for coffee. Jules had managed to earn a pee break in Kansas, but her cop-a-squat in an open field was the furthest any of us had gotten away from them.